Teachers of virtually all grades from elementary schools to colleges and even graduate or professional schools typically need to measure student progress throughout the school year, measure development of college and career readiness skills, e.g., using Common Core standards, and forecast future student achievement on high-stakes assessments. However, many—if not most—teachers are usually overwhelmed. Too often, they have too much grading to do, e.g., term papers or other writing assignments, in too little time. Because of this, teachers tend to find it incredibly difficult to provide feedback that is immediate, comprehensive, and detailed.
While some commercial assessment tools presently exist, such as the ETS e-rater and Pearson Intelligent Essay Assessor, such assessment tools are prohibitively expensive, provide only a holistic score rather than any trait-based scoring, are not proven to predict summative scores, and lack connection to the classroom curriculum because they are typically tied to only published provided content and curriculums. Indeed, these assessment tools rely on publisher prompts and curriculum because such assessment tools require at least 200 hand-scored training essays (typically 5,000 minimum essays for meaningful results), significantly more than any teacher could or should need to do in order to train the assessment tool.